(last revision: May 16 2008 3:56 p.m.: Added Shelly Farnham's slides to Week 6, Details about group presentations, schedule, posted.)
Instructor: Hanson Hosein
Office: Room 251C, Communications Building
Office Hours: By Appointment
Contact: hosein at u.washington.edu
Course Description & Objectives
This is one of the three core courses in the Master of Communication in Digital Media program.
It seeks to enhance your critical and analytical skills, along with your ability to express yourself, so you can better understand the production, exploitation and consumption of digital media.
Specifically, you will learn how to:
1. Develop a story concept, marketing plan or business idea related to digital media in communication.
2. Research that concept, plan or idea.
3. Leverage digital media resources to enhance your research.
4. Express this research through a proposal – in writing and through multimedia.
5. Pitch and present/distribute the idea.
We will accomplish this by focusing on how to research a single “problem” for the entire class: how can institutions (business, non-profit or governmental) internally adopt the use of social media?
I’m phrasing this broadly, which will give you the opportunity to look at a subject, entity or project that is particularly interesting to you. It also allows us to discuss some of the more important developments occurring in social media right now.
Examples: intra-company communications (blogging, wikis, social networking), a business startup that involves social media, developing storytelling content that will take advantage of social media for both production and distribution.
In this class, we will not actually be involved in the substantive creation of the project itself. Rather, we will learn how to conduct the appropriate research to implement the project. This also allows us, more generally, to explore how to effectively develop and sell our ideas in digital media. And along the way, we may even discover how digital media is changing the face of research itself!